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McCain and Wikipedia

It's hard enough to discourage students from using Wikipedia in their end-of-term papers. But to see a presidential candidate appear to crib from the online source in a major foreign policy address?

The Georgia crisis hasn't featured particularly good use of history from commentators, either. Here's Robert Kagan: "Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama."

It's startling, to put it mildly, to see on the pages of the Washington Post the Sudeten Crisis termed a "morally ambiguous dispute." I fully sympathize with those who argue that we need to do what we can to help Georgia. But comparing the current unrest to the "morally ambiguous" Sudeten dispute is an abuse of history.

Posted on Monday, August 11, 2008 at 5:44 PM | Comments (18) | Return

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